Madison nodded, waiting.
“So they talk in front of you, see what I mean? Now, most folks stay at Swan’s they’re going to be Federalists. I guess that ain’t any news to you. And they come out for their mounts and they don’t give me no warning, so I’m scrambling around getting them saddled and all and they go to talking like I ain’t got ears, know what I mean?”
Madison nodded.
“And they’re saying the electors—them that cast the electoral votes, ain’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, they’re saying the electors likely will cast votes two for two, see, every man for Mr. J.
and
the New Yorker. And then it would be a tie and they’d be on horseback.”
“Horseback, eh?”
“They’re saying maybe it ain’t over yet—they get a tie and they say they can find some way to set it on its ear—keep the government in their own hands, see? So it seems like us Democrats would be smart not to let no tie develop. I don’t know if you’ve thought on that or not.”
“Billy,” Madison said, shaking his hand, “that’s very good thinking. I’m in your debt.”
Billy gave him a grand smile. “Don’t think nothing of it, Mr. Madison. We’re all in this together.”
Dolley watched Jimmy chew over the dilemma. She thought it incredibly selfish for Aaron to expose them to danger for reasons of shabby pride. Twenty as opposed to twenty-one would shatter the republic? Really! The tail wagged the dog.
Still, there was tension in the air. An old friend, a Federalist—which had never mattered before—set up a whist game
that turned into an awkward disaster. The other women seemed to feel they were sitting with the devil’s handmaiden. In a millinery shop that same afternoon a fierce old woman in an expensive hat of apricot velvet put a claw on her arm and hissed, “I just want to tell you, we all of us, the sensible people, the right people, think it’s
terrible
what you and your husband and the rest of them are doing!”
Men milled about the streets, laughing Democrats celebrating victory with bottles in hand, Federalists with downturned mouths. Several street fights became one with the whist game, the old woman, the newspaper venom, the vile accusations, the tomato someone had thrown at their carriage, glares at the inn, a rude woman who’d brushed past her in the corridor …
It was like nothing she could remember since the early days of the Revolution when she was a child and all around her patriots and loyalists were dividing into blood enemies. And into this tinder Aaron had thrown a flaming torch. It struck her that she’d never felt he had much weight, clever and handsome and charming through he certainly was—witness the way women melted in his presence. But that made her feel guilty and that made her angry. Would nothing go right in these ugly days? In fact, Aaron had been good to her when she’d needed help and she hadn’t questioned weight then. She’d been half crazed with grief when the fever had taken baby and husband. She’d asked Senator Burr to guide her affairs and stand as guardian to her little boy in case the fever returned for her.
As a tenant in her mother’s house he’d owed her nothing, but he had performed nobly. She’d felt so alone, this being after her Quaker father’s business had failed in Philadelphia, and the church had expelled him for debt, and something broke in him—in the end, she thought, women were stronger than men—and he went to bed till he died while her mother opened for roomers.
Months passed and she’d put aside widow’s weeds and looked about. And one day Aaron had told her that the great little Madison had asked to be presented. The request was so
specific of serious intent that she was breathless, and that very afternoon he’d brought Mr. Madison around. Jimmy had been terribly nervous, his hand shook when he took hers, he murmured “You’re very beautiful,” and then was tongue-tied; and she had rattled on rather desperately, wondering if she were making a fool of herself, wondering if he were even interested; and then he stood to go and asked if he might call tomorrow and would she on the next evening accompany him to a dinner General Washington was giving?
He was a power in the House in those days and very close to the general, and she’d been swept into the highest circles of the capital in urbane Philadelphia and had held her own. Better than her own. Jimmy had glowed in her presence, many people told her she’d made a new man of him, and one day dear old Aunt Martha—whom Dolley could see was easily a match for the general despite her gentle manner—said she would nudge Jimmy along.
But nothing happened. Then, with the session ending and the time ever so clearly now or never, he sent a note: He had something to say. She wore a gown the color of roses that was cut as low as she dared, seated him on the sofa beside her, and waited for what she became sure would be bad news. He stumbled, his tongue twisted, she noticed a buckle coming loose on his shoe and he’d worn hose that were yellowing with age—not at all the picture of a man who’d come to propose marriage. She had an awful impulse to tell him she understood, he could go,
au revoir—
but no!—she would fight to the end. So she waited, smiling, encouraging him, and at last he blurted the question she’d been desperate to hear and she collapsed into his arms. Six wonderful years had passed, that no children had come the only shadow. She knew there was ugly gossip about this, which she could settle in a word if she chose … .
She wanted an afternoon walk and they set out, her arm through his, on brick sidewalks laid in sunburst design, past graceful stoops and saplings set in sidewalk squares and guarded by little iron fences. He still had a few days before decision and he was laying out the pros and cons, when an
elderly voice hailed them. They saw an old man on a younger man’s arm. Jimmy said it was Colonel Emberly, an old family friend, and his son. The young man, prematurely gray and wearing an army major’s uniform, scarcely spoke and when he did his lips scarcely moved.
Glaring, the colonel cried, “I never thought I’d see a Madison betray his people. You’ve turned your coat, sir.”
She saw a look of surprising vulnerability flash over Jimmy’s face and then his expression hardened. “I’ve done no such thing, sir, and I resent your saying so.”
It was so unexpected that she felt momentarily disoriented; then she saw the officer staring at her with angry intensity and all her instincts went on guard.
“Oh, do you?” the old man shouted. “Well, the people who matter, who count for something in this country, they understand what you’re doing, the false doctrine you and your precious Mr. Jefferson are spreading. Common man democracy!” He spat the words out as if they had a foul taste. “Look at France, a monument to what it really means. What it’s always meant. You let the rabble get control and they’ll destroy everything—
everything
! Dragged everyone who counted off to that great bloody blade of theirs; you think that can’t happen here? It
can
. You’ll see. You think you’re safe, but they’ll turn on you too; you’ll never be able to control the passions of your own followers—”
Listening to the old man rant, she saw the danger; he believed every word of it. Like the women at whist, the old woman in the apricot hat, he honestly saw Democrats as in league with the devil! No one denied that ideals expressed in our own revolution had spun out of control in France, the clattering guillotine taking revenge against centuries of wealth and privilege. And then Napoleon Bonaparte seized a broken country and imposed his rule—
“We’re not the French, Colonel,” Jimmy said. His voice was strong. It was the point he’d made again and again. The French peasant came out of feudalism, but the common man in America has governed himself for two hundred years. He won’t lose his mind.
For a moment she felt reassured; but then, looking into the old eyes, she saw he hadn’t even heard. “Do you have any idea how frightened people are?” he cried. “They look for mobs, riots, pillaging, burning. They’re building walls, setting out buckets of sand, rigging two-man pumps at their wells. Laying out pistols and shotguns—”
The son interrupted. It was snakelike, his lips scarcely moving, and this stirred an atavistic fear in her.
“It won’t come to mobs, because
we won’t let it
! The army will be ready, cannon loaded with grape and bayonets fixed. We’ll cut rabble mobs down like scything wheat!”
He whirled on Jimmy. “Take this as warning. You damned Jacobins aren’t going to steal this country from us!”
“We’re not Jacobins!” Dolley cried. The radical French clubs that led to revolutionary violence were nothing like American Democrats.
But the whisper went on, harsh as stones rubbing together. “The army stands for order, decency, stability. We destroyed the whiskey rebels, and I promise you we’ll handle your democratic rabble just the same.”
Oh, the whiskey rebels! Pennsylvania farmers protesting an unfair tax on what they made from their grain. There’d been a rough few weeks, but they’d dispersed in the end. But Federalists had mounted an army and saw the outcome as a great victory.
The soldier’s hand came up slowly and he pointed a finger at her that was like a pistol. “So let me tell you, madam—and you, Mr. Jacobin Democrat
traitor
—you go one little notch beyond the straight and narrow and we’ll
crush
you!”
She stared into his saurian eyes; her hands were cold and there was an icy flutter in her breast.
And Jimmy said, “Major, no one is talking mobs except you. Should mobs form, citizens can be deputized to control them. You are a subordinate officer of the U.S. Army, and what you are talking about is using the military to subvert the democratic process. Such action would be high treason, and such talk, sir, is a disgrace to your uniform!”
That told him—and yet, stating it so baldly increased her own sense of ground opening at her feet into a pit of danger. Now she saw what the stakes before them really were. They turned back toward Swan’s and walked in silence. She clutched her shawl to her throat.
“Jimmy,” she said after several blocks, “was he serious about the army? That it would come out; he’s an officer after all. Could it block the election results?”
He hesitated. “Not—not on it’s own, I’d think. But of course, any army is there to support what is, not what could be. It’s conservative, resistant to change—”
“But would it come out?” she cried.
“On orders, yes. Soldiers do what they’re told.”
“Could Alex order it? Override Mr. Adams?”
“I—I don’t think so. It would be quite illegal.”
“But if someone tried, it would take a commander of real stature to resist, wouldn’t it? A General Washington. And we’re cursed with General Wilkinson, a rotten traitor.”
“We don’t know he’s a traitor, not for sure.”
“Oh, Jimmy, sometimes you carry fairness too far. Everyone says he’s in the pay of the Spanish.”
“But it’s only suspicion.”
“Well, when everyone suspects the leader of the army works for the enemy, it’s a disgrace! Anyway, look at him! Gross, slimy, unctuous, obsequious—”
She had riveting memories of Wilkinson, uniform buttons about to pop over his belly, saber out like a rooster tail, toadying to her because her husband was important—
“How did such a creature land such a command anyway?”
“There’s a type of man who’s adept only at advancing himself, but at that he’s very adept—canny as a fox and no more scrupulous, qualities more forgivable in fox than in main.”
Her hand tightened on her arm. “Darling, let’s keep this on a steady course. Can you imagine having your fate in the hands of General Wilkinson or that nasty major?”
She clutched the shawl closer. More than danger alone, she had a chilled feeling that something evil lay out there in
the dark like a sea monster swimming just beyond sight. They dined in their room, emptied a bottle of wine, and still she was cold. She sat on his lap, her head on his shoulder, and whispered, “Take me to bed, Jimmy. Love me. Hold me. I need to be held … .”
Still, things were brighter in the morning sun. She decided she was weary of being worried and frightened; after all,
they’d
won the election.
And then Rob Mustard banged on their door at the inn, lively as ever. Said he’d left New York and was bound for Charleston and heard they were here. She’d known him since Philadelphia, where he had run a loud, vibrant newspaper that always made sense. Then he’d shifted to New York, still publishing the truth as he saw it, which was as the Madisons saw it.
He was tall and skinny, fifty or so, with a mop of wild, gray hair, a big laugh, and a ready eye for the humor of human foibles. Nothing made his editorial wit and ardor glow more fiercely than the missteps of government. But as he nursed a glass of Madeira, she saw a difference in his eyes, something haunted.
“So,” he said, “they smashed my press and I’m wanted in New York.” His smile couldn’t mask hurt.
“Wanted?” she said.
“Under indictment. Fleeing arrest. Sedition, you see, which is defined as saying what people in power don’t want to hear.” He laughed without mirth. “So I’m on the run. Learned from poor Jim Callender—he waited till they came and pied his type and wrecked his press and off to solitary he went and lucky they didn’t hang him.” A wry grin. “You remember, I never minded calling a spade a spade when describing Federalist sins, but I’m not crazy brave. I slipped away under cover of night. Peter Freneau promised me a berth on his paper in Charleston, and I’m on my way.”